Spectrum-Aware Anypath Routing in Multi-Hop Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) have been emerging as a promising technique to improve the spectrum efficiency of wireless and mobile networks, which form spectrum clouds to provide services for unlicensed users. As spectrum clouds, the performance of multi-hop CRNs heavily depends on the routing protocol. In this paper, taking the newly proposed Cognitive Capacity Harvesting network as an example, we study the routing problem in multi-hop CRNs and propose a spectrum-aware anypath routing (SAAR) scheme with consideration of both the salient spectrum uncertainty feature of CRNs and the unreliable transmission characteristics of wireless medium. A new cognitive anypath routing metric is designed based on channel and link statistics to accurately estimate and evaluate the quality of an anypath under uncertain spectrum availability. A polynomial-time routing algorithm is also developed to find the best channel and the associated optimal forwarding set and compute the least cost anypath. Extensive simulations show that the proposed protocol SAAR significantly increases packet delivery ratio and reduces end-to-end delay with low communication and computation overhead, which makes it suitable and scalable to be used in multi-hop CRNs.